Although advances in hardware speed and storage technology have kept up with
(and, indeed, have driven) increases in database size, the same is not true
of the tools we use to explore and understand these data
[1]}.
Modern data sets routinely outstrip the capabilities of contemporary
visualization and analysis software, and this problem can only get worse as
data volumes from future astronomy-related programs
(e.g., Large Synoptic Survey Telescope [LSST]See http://www.lsst.org,
Supernova Acceleration Probe [SNAP]See http://snap.lbl.gov,
Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System
[PanSTARRS]See http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public, and
Dark Energy Survey [DES]See http://www.darkenergysurvey.org)
and ever-larger supercomputer simulations increase by orders of magnitude.
See [2]} for a review.
Data sets of this size and dimensionality defy interactive analysis with
standard tools such as MATLAB,See http://www.mathworks.com
Octave,See http://www.octave.org
Mathematica,See http://www.wolfram.com
R,See http://www.r-project.org
S++,See http://www.splusplus.com
xGobi,See http://www.research.att.com/areas/stat/xgobi
Mirage,See http://www.bell-labs.com/project/mirage
gnuplot,See http://www.gnuplot.info etc.
To address this problem, we have developed Viewpoints.
